by Antal Szerb
And compared with this everything else was as nothing—Éva, the planned suicide, even Italy itself.
“Just don’t let me burst out crying, not just now. Father would deeply despise that, and he might also guess my tears were for him.”
Mihály pulled himself together and put on his most expressionless face, the face he habitually adopted for anything to do with his family.
“It was very kind of you to come, Father. You must have had important reasons for making this long journey, in summer … ”
“Yes of course, son, my reasons were important. But nothing unpleasant. There isn’t anything wrong. Although you haven’t asked, your mother and the family are well. And I see there’s nothing particularly wrong with you. Well then, let’s go and have lunch. Take me somewhere where they don’t cook in oil.”
“Erzsi and Zoltán Pataki were with me the day before yesterday,” his father said during the meal.
“What’s that? Erzsi’s in Pest? And they were together?”
“Oh yes. Pataki went to Paris, they made up, and he brought Erzsi home.”
“But why, and how?”
“My son, I truly do not know, and you can imagine, I didn’t enquire. We talked only about business matters. You know that your … how can I put this? … your odd, but I have to say not entirely surprising, behaviour placed me in an absurd situation with regard to Erzsi. An absurd financial situation. For Erzsi to liquidate her investment, in today’s climate … but you know all this, I think. Tivadar told you all about it in his letter.”
“Yes, I do know. Perhaps you won’t believe this, but I’ve been terribly worried about what might happen. Erzsi said that Zoltán … but do go on.”
“Thank God, there’s no harm done. That’s precisely why they came to see me, to discuss the terms under which I could pay them back the money. But I have to say they were so reasonable I was really very surprised. We agreed on all the details. They really are not too oppressive, and I hope we can resolve the whole matter without further difficulty. All the more so, because your uncle Péter managed to find a wonderful new lawyer.”
“But tell me: Zoltán, I mean Pataki, has behaved really decently? I don’t understand.”
“He has conducted himself like an absolute gentleman. Just between us, I think it’s because he’s so glad Erzsi went back to him. And he’s certainly carrying out her intentions. Erzsi is a really wonderful woman. It’s bad enough … but I have made up my mind not to reproach you. You always were a strange boy, and you know what you have done.”
“And Zoltán didn’t abuse me? He didn’t say that … ”
“He said nothing. Not a word about you, which was only natural, given the circumstances. On the other hand, Erzsi did mention you.”
“Erzsi?”
“Yes. She said you had met in Rome. She gave absolutely no details, and naturally I didn’t enquire, but she hinted that you were in a very critical situation, and thought that your family had turned against you. No, don’t say anything. As a family we’ve always respected each other’s privacy, and we’ll keep it that way. I’m not interested in the details. But Erzsi did advise that, if it were at all possible, I should come to Rome myself and talk to you about your going back to Pest. Her actual words were, that I should ‘bring you home’.”
Bring him home? Yes, Erzsi knew what she was saying, and how well she knew Mihály! She saw clearly that his father could lead him home like a truanting schoolboy. She well knew it was his nature to submit, as indeed he was submitting, like a child caught running away: but of course always with the mental reservation that, when the next opportunity presented itself, he would run away again.
Erzsi was so right. There was no other course but to go home. There might have been another solution, but … the external circumstances he had wanted to escape through suicide seemed to have vanished. Zoltán had made his peace; his family were waiting for him with open arms; nobody was after him.
“So, here I am,” continued his father, “and I would like you to wind up all your business here immediately and come home. On tonight’s train, in fact. You know I haven’t much time.”
“Please, this is all a bit sudden,” said Mihály, emerging from his day-dream. “This morning I was thinking of anything but going home to Pest.”
“I’m sure, but what objection is there to your coming home?”
“Nothing. Just let me catch my breath. Look, it would do you no harm to lie down here for a while and take a siesta. While you’re resting I’ll get my thoughts in order.”
“Of course, as you think best.”
Mihály placed his father in the comfort of the bed. He himself sat in a large armchair, with the firm resolution of doing some thinking. His meditation took the form of recalling certain feelings in turn, and scrutinising their intensities. That was how he usually decided what he wanted, and whether he really did want what he thought he wanted.
Did he really want to die? Did he still hanker after a death like Tamás’s? He focused his mind on that longing and looked for the sweetness associated with it. But now he could discover no sweetness, but, on the contrary, nausea and fatigue, such as a man feels after love-making.
Then he realised why he felt this nausea. The desire had already been satisfied. Last night, in the Italian house, in his terror and vision he had already realised the wish that had haunted him since adolescence. He had fulfilled it, if not in external reality, at least in the reality of the mind. And with that the desire had been, if not permanently, at least for the time being, assuaged. He was freed from it, freed from the ghost of Tamás.
And Éva?
He noticed a letter on his desk. It had been put there while he had been out to lunch. It must have arrived the day before, but the lady next door had forgotten to give it to him. He got up, and read Éva’s parting words.
Mihály,
When you read this I will be already on my way to Bombay. I’m not coming to you. You aren’t going to die. You’re not Tamás. Tamás’s death was right for Tamás alone. Everyone has to find his own way to die.
God be with you,
Éva.
By evening they were in fact already on the train. They were discussing business matters, his father describing what had been happening in the firm while he had been away, what the prospects were, and what new responsibilities he had in mind for him.
Mihály listened in silence. He was going home. He would attempt once more what he had failed to do for fifteen years: to conform. Perhaps this time he would succeed. That was his fate. He was giving in. The facts were stronger than he was. There was no escaping. They were all too strong: the fathers, the Zoltáns, the business world, people.
His father fell asleep, and Mihály stared out of the window, trying to make out the contours of the Tuscan landscape by the light of the moon. He would have to remain with the living. He too would live: like the rats among the ruins, but nonetheless alive. And while there is life there is always the chance that something might happen …
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
IN 1991 a friend placed in my hand a slim novel entitled Utas és Holdvilág. “You must read this,” he insisted. “This is the novel we all read as students. Every educated Hungarian knows and loves this book.” I too fell under its spell. The gently ironical tone, the deceptive casualness with which the story unfolds, the amused scepticism playing on every variety of pretension, inspired an immediate trust. That trust deepened as the quality of the writing became apparent. The opening scene, moving between the Grand Canal of Venice and its seedy back-alleys with their melancholy view of the Island of the Dead, typifies Antal Szerb’s gift for loading details with an almost symbolic resonance. Mihály’s little escapade neatly prefigures the larger action that will follow, defines the terms of the conflict, and establishes the faintly surreal tone with its constant hint of irony.
This irony, distinctively Middle-European in character, operates on every level. First, as with Jane Austen at her most
sly, Szerb’s authorial voice constantly mingles with that of his hero, repeatedly wrong-footing the reader to leave him peculiarly vulnerable to events. Then there are the ironic perspectives imposed by the neatly symmetrical plot, with its parallels and contrasts, each a logical consequence of Mihály and Erzsi’s deeply paradoxical marriage. Such irony goes beyond mere technique, investing everything with a disturbing ambiguity. Mihály is both anti-hero (as often noted) and hero. His actions are immoral, absurd, farcical, yet somehow our sympathies are never quite alienated. Some principle at the core of his being calls to us. His progress is both a collapse into adolescent disarray and, in its own way, a genuine spiritual journey, though pursued ‘by moonlight’ and leading to inevitable defeat. However daft his actions, he has an attractive intelligence, a surprising capacity for self-honesty, a certain reckless courage in pursuing his wild quest. Its predictably wry conclusion discredits an entire social structure, that of “the fathers, the Zoltáns, the whole punitive middle-class establishment”. Mihály is truly one of those “failures and misfits of a civilisation by which we best understand its weaknesses”.
This is novelistic art of a high order. The man who produced it was no less remarkable. Born in Budapest in 1901, he lived through perhaps the most traumatic years of Hungarian, indeed European, history. Just seventeen when the Empire collapsed in military defeat, his student years saw the bloody communist revolution of 1919, foreign occupation, the ‘white terror’ and the Second World War. His technically Jewish ancestry and his lifelong stance against fascism attracted mounting official persecution from the age of thirty-seven, and he died horribly, at forty-three, in the forced-labour camp at Balf. Yet little of this is reflected in his major writings, or indeed the man himself: life-loving, playful, a brilliantly ironical but never cynical mind, more in keeping with the eighteenth than the twentieth century. A cradle Catholic (the family were, like most Budapest Jews, entirely assimilated), educated in a Piarist seminary, he became the quintessential Hungarian man of letters, not just admired but widely loved. The narrative of Journey by Moonlight coincides with rising fascism at home and abroad, and probes the national obsession with suicide, yet the touch is ever light, the focus personal and psychological. All his literary connections reveal a cast of mind humane rather than ideological, mystical rather than political, scholarly but boldly original in its interests and methods.
Those interests were wide-ranging. Antal Szerb was a lifelong Anglophile, an authority on the German, Italian, French and English traditions, and his enduring monument is, besides the fiction, a ground-breaking History of World Literature. As a despairing colleague wrote: “He knew everything”. The intelligence that pervades Journey by Moonlight is of an exceptional order: an intelligence not just of the head, but of the heart.
LEN RIX
March 2001
THE PENDRAGON LEGEND
Antal Szerb
Translated by Len Rix
ISBN 978–1–901285–89–5
At an end-of-London-season soirée, the young Hungarian scholar dilettante Janos Bátky is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumours. Invited to the family seat, Pendragon Castle in North Wales, Bátky receives a mysterious phone call warning him not to go …
Set in Wales, The Pendragon Legend is a gently satirical blend of gothic and romantic genres, crossed with the murder mystery format to produce a fast-moving and often hilarious romp. But, beneath the surface, the reader becomes aware of a steely intelligence probing moral, psychological and religious questions.
Szerb was fluent in German and English and greatly interested in unusual religious beliefs. His knowledge of Rosicrucianism and the occult informs this often very funny book, which takes potshots at the period’s popular fiction.
Paul Bailey The Independent
Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language, and a playful, sophisticated intellect. This book is an absolute treat, deliciously ludic, to be read with a big smile on your face throughout.
Nicholas Lezard The Guardian
OLIVER VII
Antal Szerb
Translated by Len Rix
ISBN 978–1–901285–90–1
The restless ruler of an obscure Central European state plots a coup against himself and moves to Venice in search of ‘real’ experience. There he falls in with a team of con-men and ends up, to his own surprise, impersonating himself. His journey through successive levels of illusion and reality teaches him much about the world, about his own nature and the paradoxes of the human condition.
A writer of immense subtlety and generosity, with an uncommonly light touch which masks its own artistry. His novels transform farce into poetry, comic melancholy into a kind of self-effacing grace … Antal Szerb is one of the great European writers.
Ali Smith
Antal Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the twentieth century.
Paul Bailey The Independent
Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language, and a playful, sophisticated intellect.
Nicholas Lezard The Guardian
FROM THE SAME AUTHOR
The Pendragon Legend
Oliver VII
Copyright
Translated from the Hungarian
by Len Rix
Translation copyright © L B Rix 2000
First published as Utas és Holdvilág, Budapest, 1937
© Estate of Antal Szerb
First published in 2001 by
Pushkin Press
12 Chester Terrace
London NW1 4ND
This ebook edition published in 2011
ISBN 978 1 906548 50 6
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Cover: Emotional Postcards The Venice Series La Fenice
© Alessandro Belgiojoso
Frontispiece: Antal Szerb
Set in 10 on 12 Baskerville Monotype
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